Louisiana Books

Dr. Mary's Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, ... Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics

Edward T. Haslam

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Subjects -> Medicine -> Basic Science -> Microbiology
Subjects -> Medicine -> Research -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

New Orleans in the summer of 1963, behind the scenes of the JFK assassination, this book is one-of-a-kind 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

If you don't want to be challenged, or you want to believe the Warren Commission Report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and unaided in the assassination of JFK, or that New Orleans and the events taking place there played no part in the assassination, don't bother to read Dr Mary's Monkey, for it will disrupt your complacency and demolish your assumptions.

This book is a serious attempt to move into an area of research that is as-yet mostly uncharted with little documentation. And it is no surprise -- most of the people involved are dead -- something happened to them soon after the assassination. One has survived, though; a woman who has created more controversy and discussion than anybody connected to the assassination, save for perhaps Lee Oswald himself.

Judyth Vary Baker, who now resides outside of the US for her own safety, is the witness whose statements pull together this book into a cohesive theory of what might have happened behind the scenes of the assassination. In addition, Haslam is a good writer who uses his own experiences (they create rather eccentric credentials for his passion for his subject-matter) to give us a book that is a real page-turner. An updated and expanded version of his earlier outrageously fascinating book "Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus", which gained a considerable cult following over the years, this edition has photos and documentation galore.

Editorial Review:

The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into coverups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys.

Pawprints of Katrina: Pets Saved and Lessons Learned

Cathy Scott

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Subjects -> Home & Garden -> Animal Care & Pets -> Essays
Subjects -> Home & Garden -> Animal Care & Pets -> General

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Lesson in Humanity and Love .... 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I just finished reading this awe inspiring book by Cathy Scott, forward by Ali McGraw, and photography by Clay Myers. I was moved to tears. It is an example of what all of us should aspire to. Having compassion and providing assistance in times of need, random acts of kindness, putting others first, caring for those who cannot care for themselves.

Tragedies always bring out the best in others, and this book is a documentary of the very best in humanity. Thank you a thousand times to all who came to the rescue of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, both animal and human. You are the angels on earth.

This is a must read for anyone who has ever loved an animal. Please visit the Best Friends Animal Society website to learn how you can help.

Editorial Review:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many animals had to fend for themselves because their owners lost them or were unable to care for them. In Pawprints of Katrina: Pets Saved and Lessons Learned, Cathy Scott documents her experience working with the Best Friends Animal Society triage center to rescue lost animals and reunite them with their owners. Over two hundred stories with accompanying photos describe dramatic and challenging rescue cases with details about the rescues, the examinations, treatment, and follow-up care by the selfless volunteers who worked to save beloved best friends.

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

Chris Rose

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Accurate, Amusing, and Well Written 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Nearly three years after the tragic events surrounding Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, I am still amazed that something like this could occur in America, professed leader of the free world. We, I hate to say it, actually I don't hate to say it because it needs to be said...America, we failed the people of the Gulf Coast and we continue to fail them. FEMA trailers dotting fields as far as the eye can see, but completely unoccupied by those who need to occupy them...FEMA trailers that are occupied, filled with noxious chemicals that will more than likely cause the inhabitants irreversable physical damage, on top of the mental damage that has already been done. We all should be ashamed of this adminstration's lack of humanity and decency. Imagine flooding again, but in the Midwest this time, and STILL nothing is being done?! Have we not learned from our mistakes? Contrary to popular belief, by those who shall remain nameless, you DID NOT DO "a helluva of a job, Brownie!" I gave a helping hand and went to Louisiana after the storm, just like many other people did and it changed me forever. Chris Rose's book is so wonderful and gives such an accurate depiction of what was going on day-to-day. It is written in a manner that makes you feel what he and the other people around him were experiencing at the time. There is no sugar coating, there is no dressing it up. It is what it is and was what it still remains. I could not put the book down and it made my flight to South Africa, all 19 hours of it, much more enjoyable and managable. I love New Orleans and the people of the Gulf Coast and hope that no one ever forgets what has happened and what continues to go unrepaired.

Editorial Review:

Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland.

They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators.

Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life.

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Douglas Brinkley

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Disaster Relief
Subjects -> Science -> Earth Sciences -> Atmospheric Sciences -> Hurricanes

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Total reviews: 120 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Tulane University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent officials alike. Get a sample of his story--and clarify your own memories--by looking through the detailed timeline he has put together of the preparation, the hurricane, and the response to one of the worst disasters in American history.

The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square

Ned Sublette

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> General
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> Colonial Period -> General

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.

The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, “rock the city.”

This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette’s previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.

The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld

Herbert Asbury

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Home to the notorious "Blue Book," which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the United States, and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The French Quarter, Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, chronicles this rather immense underbelly of "The Big Easy." From the murderous exploits of Mary Jane "Bricktop" Jackson and Bridget Fury, two prostitutes who became famous after murdering a number of their associates, to the faux-revolutionary "filibusters" who, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of public support—though without official governmental approval—undertook military missions to take over the bordering Spanish regions in Texas, the French Quarter had it all. Once again, Asbury takes the reader on an intriguing, photograph-filled journey through a unique version of the American underworld.

Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City

Jed Horne

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Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.

As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.

Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at public expense–all of these lives collide in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.

Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care. In Breach of Faith, Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

Ken Wells

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With a long and colorful family history of defying storms, the seafaring Robin cousins of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-built fishing boats in a sheltered Civil War–era harbor called Violet Canal. But when Violet is overrun by killer surges, the Robins must summon all their courage, seamanship, and cunning to save themselves and the scores of others suddenly cast into their care.

In this gripping saga, Louisiana native Ken Wells provides a close-up look at the harrowing experiences in the backwaters of New Orleans during and after Katrina. Focusing on the plight of the intrepid Robin family, whose members trace their local roots to before the American Revolution, Wells recounts the landfall of the storm and the tumultuous seventy-two hours afterward, when the Robins’ beloved bayou country lay catastrophically flooded and all but forgotten by outside authorities as the world focused its attention on New Orleans. Wells follows his characters for more than two years as they strive, amid mind-boggling wreckage and governmental fecklessness, to rebuild their shattered lives. This is a story about the deep longing for home and a proud bayou people’s love of the fertile but imperiled low country that has nourished them.

You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans

Elsa Hahne

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Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Regional & International -> U.S. Regional -> Cajun & Creole
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Regional & International -> U.S. Regional -> South

Editorial Review:

Eating and cooking well are not just industries but ways of life for all New Orleans. Writer and photographer Elsa Hahne has visited the kitchens of thirty-three of New Orleans's home cooks and raconteurs and has served up an expansive smorgasbord inspired by this vibrant city's love affair with food.

Almost every cultural group that has made its mark on New Orleans is represented in these pages: Creole, African American, Native American, Isleño, German, Cajun, Italian, Irish, Greek, Hungarian, Croatian, Cuban, Honduran, Mexican, Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, and more.

With thirty-three first-person accounts and over one hundred black-and-white and full-color photographs, You Are Where You Eat proves that the local population remains as passionate about cooking after the hurricanes of 2005 as at any time before. Among the eighty-five recipes are such classic New Orleans dishes as red beans and rice, catfish court bouillon, crawfish bisque, filé gumbo, grillades, and daube glacé, but also more recent arrivals to local tables: yakamein, pork tamales, crawfish samosas, and Vietnamese spring rolls.

Elsa Hahne is the creator of the touring exhibit You Are WHERE You Eat--Stories and Recipes from the Crescent City, which was supported by the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has appeared in numerous international magazines and newspapers.

The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

Charles Lane

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The untold story of the slaying of a Southern town’s ex-slaves and a white lawyer’s historic battle to bring the perpretators to justice Following the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town, like many, where African Americans and whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex–Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse. With skill and tenacity, The Washington Post’s Charles Lane transforms this nearly forgotten incident into a riveting historical saga.

Seeking justice for the slain, one brave U.S. attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetrators—but they all went free. What followed was a series of courtroom dramas that culminated at the Supreme Court, where the justices’ verdict compromised the victories of the Civil War and left Southern blacks at the mercy of violent whites for generations. The Day Freedom Died is an electrifying piece of historical detective work that captures a gallery of characters from presidents to townspeople, and re-creates the bloody days of Reconstruction, when the often brutal struggle for equality moved from the battlefield into communities across the nation.